These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the Referama team, formed by Alejandro Riera and Fernando Sáinz.

Lately, we’ve been laughing at the never ending pile of difficulties in order to run a startup. It’s the same kind of laughter that you have when you dive through a huge wave in the sea just to meet her bigger sister and the rest of the family upon emerging. Philip’s last article encouraged us to resist the ‘Trough of Sorrow’ that follows a successful press coverage. Great, if we are lucky enough to get Techcrunched we’ll be closer to facing the “crash of ineptitude” and “wiggles of false hope”. Only then we will be know if we can make it out alive from the the valley of despair and the temple of doom.

At least it is becoming clear that this is an adventure. Who is picking up the names? We were happily thinking about early adopters when we discovered, The Chasm. If you manage to attract some people you’ll walk directly into the pitfall of death, also known as the inevitable phase of annihilation or destruction of hope. Yes, we will launch a startup and enroll with the lemmings, awesome.

But hey, failing is good, investors love people who have already failed, and we’ll have better chances on our fourth attempt. When you think about it, it is tempting to crash our 2nd startup just a little faster.

Everyday you do your best at reconciling certain contradictions like, “don’t focus on money now, you still don’t know your clients or product” and “tell me your electricity expenses in five years” .. “ do not take friends as founders” and “you have to trust and know your founders like the back of your hand because a startup is like two years in a submarine”. Focus but do twenty things at a time, listen to feedback but stick to what you think is best, etc.

Competitors are a another good reason to give up before you start. Do you have lots of them? That’s bad. They probably have a couple million in funding, and have been trained by Spartans with years of experience. And if there are very few competitors, even worse, this means nobody cares. But, if choose to do it anyhow, clones will blossom like mushrooms overnight ready to surpass you.

So people will say, “Google, Apple, Facebook or any of those could develop what you do with the snap of their fingers”, and then ask “What is your unfair advantage?”. A good anwer would be “our madness”. We wished we could say “our grand network of partnerships” or “because we’re holding a thermal detonator”. At the end, any edge we may have can be matched by others, but our strength is to want something to exist and to be stubborn enough to create it one way or another. If you don’t want to put in that in your canvas, you can say that being small lets you evolve faster and try new things. Now you sound like a mutant cockroach, only with shorter life expectations.

Trying to build a startup is impossible. But you are going to attempt it, till the death. Literally. 99 of startups result in a nuclear explosion, and the remaining 1 percent are not as fortunate.

Being part of the Tetuan Valley Startup School and el Vivero Carabanchel, made us realize that the best thing before vanishing off the face of earth is to be surrounded by other people who are going mental, and struggling just like us to make something new on their own. It helps to share each others frustration and enthusiasm. We work together on holidays; we discuss each others challenges and we will laugh together when we see the next tidal wave coming. Without a support group like this, we would explode before we even got started.